Understanding the by-election results

Kindly note that this post falls under the category of “political gossip” and not under the category of “policy analysis” that this blog is mostly filled with

So the BJP has got trounced in the by elections that were counted yesterday. People have been quick to call this a referendum on Modi’s government and are asking him to change course (each commentator is calling for a change of course in a different direction – possibly with the vector sum of them being nothing). I got an email this morning asking for reasons of the BJP’s poor performance and this is what I wrote back:

So in that one vote that you have, you need to collectively express a range of emotions – like which party you want to form the government, who you want the prime minister to be, who will take best care of your community in your constituency, who is the best person to represent your constituency in the assembly, which local person you can turn to in times of trouble, etc. (it’s a very long list). So your vote is essentially a weighted average of your emotions in all these aspects.

In the elections in May, thanks to the non-existence of a government for a very long time, the weights given to a stable and strong government at the centre and choice of prime minister shot up. Like crazy. And it was clear before the elections that there was only one party and one man who could offer this kind of a government.

Since the weight given to this factor in the minds of people was so high, it trumped everything else, and even the proverbial lamppost on a BJP ticket (especially in Uttar Pradesh) managed to get elected! And thus we got a party with full majority. And we got the desired man as PM. And we will most likely have a stable government for the next five years.

A bypoll is different – especially when you have a small number of by polls they simply don’t affect who forms the government and who the prime minister should be. Thus, the weight given to those elements of the vector, which were extremely high in May,were set to zero. Thanks to that, people voted based on the other components – like caste, local dominance, community support and all that. In that respect I’m not surprised at all in terms of the result.

Also it’s not fair to compare the performance in these bye-elections to the party performance in the respective assembly segments in the lok sabha elections. What we should compare these bypolls to is to the parties that held these seats before they fell vacant. The media has once again succeeded in distorting the narrative to come to hopefully desired conclusions?